“How far we going to walk?” Dave said.

“Until we’re sure they’re not following us,” I said.

“And then what?”

“We find a place to hole up for the night. And in the morning, we keep walking,” I said.

“Somewhere with food and water,” Charlene said.

“Ideally,” I said.

That was when the screaming started; screaming and shots fired.

Chapter Twelve

“They’re in trouble,” Allison said. It was a needless statement. We all knew it. Maybe because we kept walking, she felt like it needed to be said.

“We’re not stopping.” I looked back, toward the sound of gunshots, toward the sound of screaming. The moon was out. I still could not see a thing beyond a few yards. Not even shadows. It was just darkness from where we had come. “The things must have come out of the woods. Was more than just those people back there.”

“We’re not going to help them?” Allison said. She spoke in a whisper. I heard the tug in her words. She wanted us to stop.

“They weren’t going to help us,” Charlene said. “They kicked us out, made us leave.”

They weren’t going to help us.

She was right, of course. We just wanted somewhere safe to rest. Food. Something to drink. They weren’t going to help us. “Wait,” I said.

“What?” Dave said.

I had to think about the future. There was no guarantee one way or the other about anything, except I knew if we were to survive as a civilization, as fucking humans, even if they weren’t going to help us… Did we want to be like that? Did we…did I want my daughter to be like them, pushing people away, not afraid to help, but unwilling to do so?

She’d be safer, yes, but she’d be alone. I wasn’t always going to be here; wasn’t always going to be around. It was parenting. My job wasn’t done. She was tough. She’d proved as much. She could handle weapons, and heartache and adaption. Where was the compassion and empathy going to come from, if not from me?

God, my thoughts made me nauseated. Mushy, and fucking flowery, but I was right. I knew I was. I knew we needed to do this. We had to make a difference. “We’re going back.”

“What?” Charlene said.

“What if that was us. What if we were the ones back there fighting off those things. Wouldn’t we want, wouldn’t we pray for help?”

“We might,” Charlene said. “But we wouldn’t expect it from a group of people we’d just chased off, that we’d just threatened.”

“Exactly. That’s why we’re doing it, going back.”

Allison pursed her lips and nodded.

“Dave?” I said.

“I’m with you. Have been since the beginning. If I wasn’t, I’d just tell you to go fuck yourself.”

I laughed. “I know that you would.”

We weren’t going to be heroes about it, though. I told everyone, as always, to stay close. We went in packed tight and staying in the center of the road. Each of us had weapons drawn. Dave and Allison had their side arms out, Charlene and I had our swords.

We’d walked further than I’d thought. I was just starting to make out the shape of the airplane in the road. I saw the white flash of rifles being fired off toward the right, toward the high school, and pointed. We didn’t want to get caught in crossfire, or accidentally mistaken for zombies. That really hadn’t been something I’d thought of, not until now, anyway.

And then I saw them. Just beyond the plane, on the grass by the front of the school. The band that had forced us away was huddled together, not unlike us. They were taking shots down the road, east.

“We’re here to help,” I said, loudly. I wanted them to know they had actual people behind them, and that we were not sneaking up on them.

A man spun around, rifle aimed at us. “Who’s here to help?”

“Gene!” It was a woman.

Gene turned back to face the zombies and fired.

“They’re getting closer,” a man said. “There might be too many of them!”

“There are,” a different woman said.

Dave ran forward, knelt beside the group and fired off six shots. I had no idea how he’d improved his aim in days, but he had. Four of the six shots were head shots, and those hit, fell and stayed down.

Allison joined them, firing round after round.

I looked at Charlene. I knew she knew what I was thinking. The guns were great, especially for hitting targets further away. All the ammo being spent had to force people to realize that once it was gone, it was gone. You might carry extra bullets or magazines, but how long would they last? A few extra days? Weeks? And you might find more, but the question didn’t change. How long until your guns were useless? The answer was simple, if vague. Eventually.

A zombie got close, on the right, and Charlene walked toward it. She held her sword in both hands, blade pointed at the moonlit sky. She resembled a ballplayer in the batter’s box. I almost yelled for her to stop, to let me handle it, but was startled when Dave shouted my name.

Two creatures were close to me, so close, so silent that Dave couldn’t get off a shot. The tip of my blade had been pointing at the grass. I brought sword up and swung right to left in a single fluid motion. Passing through an arm and ribs and the other arm did little to detract from the impact of the swing. I felt the impact in my hands. The sharpness of the blade and the power behind the swing cut the first and closest in two. The top half of the body slid off from the lower, it made a thwash sound as it hit cold grass. The arm stumps raised and reached, and its head still had the sense to gnash teeth as if it were moments from a meal, instead of seconds from me driving the blade through its temple with a fisted plunge.

I heard a gunshot and thought I heard a single bullet whiz by my head. Allison’s target had been the second zombie. Like Dave, she’d improved. The female monster collapsed, thick black blood oozing from an entry wound above the decaying left eyeball.

I’d missed Charlene’s kill. The creature’s head was chunked open like a pie wedge had been cut from the skull. She had blood spray on her clothing and skin.

“Is there someplace safe we can run to?” I said.

“The school, we should get back inside the school,” Gene said. He waved at everyone.

We followed close behind Gene and his group. I stayed in back and kept checking over my shoulder. Seemed like mostly slow moving zombies, thankfully. Didn’t make them any less dangerous. In large numbers, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, and that was where having swords and machetes sucked. It was one thing to fight off a handful of creatures with steel, but the idea of killing an circling mass and surviving with just a sword was unlikely.

Our entire group moved like a snake, one behind the other, not toward the school’s front entrance, but around to the side of the building. We didn’t stop there either. There were no doors, but many of the windows were boarded up, suggesting this might be the group’s safe haven. I did not see any doorway into the school though.

We reached, not the back, but another corner of the high school building, I knew we’d put some considerable distance between us and the zombies. So much so, I’d stopped checking over my shoulder every other second. By the three large green dumpsters, I saw a door.

Gene jingled a set of keys. It was a big ring, one a janitor might carry. The woman who always seemed by his side urged him on with her hands going up and down. “Hurry, Gene. Hurry, please.”

“Gene,” one of the other guys said and kept looking from Gene to the corner. If zombies rounded it, we’d be trapped in this nook, this alcove area.

I took a quick inventory. There were seven of them; three men and four women. We didn’t have long. The zombies after us might be moving slowly, but they were walking toward us. “Gene,” I said.